Tag Archives: professional development

Ed-Tech and Media MOOC Invitation

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While many of you who find yourselves here may already been in the loop on this, I wanted to take the opportunity to invite readers who may not be yet to participate, lurk, or test the digital waters of an open online learning experience being offered by some of my internet colleagues in the new year. Alec Couros is a professor of Educational Technology and Media at the University of Regina, and one of the pioneers in delivering online and blended courses in an open online format. He and the other course facilitators constitute a veritable constellation of educational innovators and are hoping to bring their shared expertise to the facilitation of an online learning community publicly on the open web, free of charge.

From Alec’s course invitation:

Think of #etmooc as an experience situated somewhere between a course and a community. While there will be scheduled webinars and information shared each week, we know that there is a lot more that we will collectively need to do if we want to create a truly collaborative and passionate community.

We’re aiming to carry on those important conversations in many different spaces – through the use of social networks, collaborative tools, shared hashtags, and in personalized spaces. What #etmooc eventually becomes, and what it will mean to you, will depend upon the ways in which you participate and the participation and activities of all of its members. Let’s see if we can create something that is not just another hashtag – and, not just another course.

Each of the topics will run for approximately two weeks, and class meetings and materials will be archived and posted to be digested on your own schedule if you like. In operating as an ‘open’ course, you can determine your own level of participation, and come and go as you please, truly. Stick around for the conversations, readings, viewings and/or assignments that are relevant to you, and don’t feel bad about tending to your ‘real life’ responsibilities as you must. What may be of perhaps greatest value in participating in the course is gaining personal experience and connections in an online learning environment, and gaining valuable experience with a community of passionate newbies, not to mention very generous experts within the field.

The tentative schedule is shaping up as follows:

  • Welcome (Jan 13-19): Welcome Event & Orientation
  • Topic 1 (Jan 20-Feb. 2): Connected Learning – Tools, Processes & Pedagogy
  • Topic 2 (Feb 3-16): Digital Storytelling – Multimedia, Remixes & Mashups
  • Topic 3 (Feb 17-Mar 2): Digital Literacy – Information, Memes & Attention
  • Topic 4 (Mar 3-16): Digital Citizenship – Identity, Footprint, & Social Activism
  • Topic 5 (Mar 17-30): The Open Movement – Open Access, OERs & Future of Ed.

If you would like to be kept in the loop as the course comes around in January, enter your details in this form.

#Unplugd11: Why Sharing Our Stories Matters

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Why Sharing Our Stories Matters: Story by Bryan Jackson from unplugd on Vimeo.

It was a great honour to be able to share the story above with members of my #Unplugd11 group – Rodd, Kim, Giulia, Kathy, and Andy – and be a part of the inspiring collaborative editing and writing process of the collectively-authored second chapter of the Summit publication, Why ______ Matters: Choices & Voices (pdf). As Giulia noted, it was amazing to work in a group where:

we negotiated meaning through shared understanding. We dug deep to determine ‘the point’. The main ideas were mined, refined, expanded and sculpted. The group was so considerate but challenging too. It was the perfect mix of choice and voice, modeled perfectly- as teachers, editors, learners, colleagues and friends.
Rodd's Group

Voices & Choices author group

As my invitation to the Unplugd Educational Summit arrived during the beginning of the unit(s) mentioned in my canoe story – which turned out to be perhaps the most fulfilling and relevant of the year – it seemed a logical focus for my essay and supporting anecdote around the topic: “Why ______ Matters.”

The conversation around Truth with respect to the emerging developments in 2011′s Arab Spring movement are seen beginning to take shape in a post highlighting many of the #Talons‘ thoughts from that first week. Megan made for a particularly inspiring synthesis to the class’ thinking:

If what happened in Egypt is any indicator as to what can be accomplished through communication, I think that maybe, I need to realize, or maybe we (and I’m talking to all my fellow youth out there) need to realize that if we organize we can accomplish something big. People may say that children and youth are better seen, and not heard. But you know what? We are the new generation, and we should have a say about what sort of world we are growing up into. So hey, there’s my two cents. Just tossing it out in the world of the internet. But I guess you might say this: I know that it actually matters now. I am a participant in this age of information.

The conversation continued across posts about events in the Middle East, discussions of Canadian history and Louis Riel, and provided powerful inspiration for the class’ This I Believe personal essays, that are the inspiration and support for my Unplugd thesis, “Why Sharing Our Stories Matters.”

Download the preface and first two chapters, as well as the upcoming sections of the Unplugd11 e-book as they are published here, and be sure  to tune into the emerging weekly author panel discussions on #DS106Radio: chapter two authors Giulia Forsythe, Rodd Lucier, Kim Gill, Kathy Cassidy, Andy McKiel and myself will be talking about Voices and Choices this Thursday evening, 9pm (EST), 6pm on the west coast (to tune into #DS106Radio, this link should open a streaming playlist in iTunes or other media players: http://www.bit.ly/ds106radio4life).

Unplug'd 11 – a Uniquely Canadian Educational Summit

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Unplugd11 was special and important to me [because] I had the chance to engage in rich discussion with Canadian educators. That was the first time for me that I was at a conference attended solely by Canadians. I wondered if it was the first time ever that a national conference was attended by only Canadians. We need more venues like this to bring together educators from across this great country.

Tom Fullerton

Just back from a cathartic odyssey into the heart of the Canadian North with a committed team of “people who care about education so much it hurts,” I will likely feel for some time yet as if there aren’t words to convey with dignity the continuous emotional, intellectual, and physical immersion in experience this weekend offered. Consider this a first broad stroke in the narrowing of a statement of purpose that might be deigned a manifestation of our collective minds.

For my part, it was invigorating to not only meet, but collaborate and explore the Canadian educational landscape with so many inspiring agents of educational change in – for me personally, at least – the epitome of Canadian Northern landscapes. Each encountering a unique pilgrimage into the heart of our country’s wilderness, Unplug’d brought together a collection of diverse voices in the threads of the story of Canada’s current state of education. We arrived with stories and theses from the edges of our schools, out on the boundaries of learning in our country, and in some ways the gathering served as an affirmation, and inspiration, for those working on the thin edge of Canadian educational change. In one another’s struggles, we were introduced to allies in kind; and in attempting to define the current perimeters of reform, as well as the elemental values by which each of us lives as educators and citizens, we each were refreshed with a glimpse of the hope for our collective future triumphs.

An immense thank you to Zoe, Rodd, Kelly, Alec, Darren, Dean, and Tom, as well as our hosts Todd, Martha, Topher, Alyha (sorry if that spelling is off), Xena (ditto), Greg, and Google at the Northern Edge for allowing such an experience to be realized. An innumerable thanks to each of the Unplug’d participants for sharing of themselves so completely throughout the weekend, either in the service of our stated purpose of creating the artifacts, or the engrossing conversations in between. As the beginning of the story is being written, you each have instilled in me a great hope for what is yet to come. It may be said yet that just as Tom Thompson and the Group of Seven went into Algonquin Park to discover and make record of an emerging Canadian artistic identity, so too might we have ventured into the heart of the North Woods to create a statement of the country’s educational frontier.

It was thoroughly an honour to be a part of it.

 

Commute

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Inspired by Grant Potter’s Prince George commute, I did a similar experiment in order to share a few minutes of transit in Port Moody.

With a little help from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan’s Deep Dark Woods‘ “All the Money I had is gone.”

Film aficionados may recognize the blur of the country store – just after I make the first right – featured in such major motion pictures as Christopher Guest’s Best in Show.

Something for myself, this week: Digital Storytelling 106

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ds106 Introduction from Bryan Jackson on Vimeo.

It’s the end of another semester of TALONS and guitar teaching,ending – as they do – in the flourish of report cards, reference letters, applications for next year’s program, a school trip to Sun Peaks, and the recording phase of the finalists in the Write Gleneagle’s Anthem contest. It is an intense time for teachers and students alike, and poses with its challenges an opportunity to rise to the occasion.

Leave it to Jim Groom to exert himself, and his rambling circus of an “Massive Open Online Course,” Digital Storytelling 106 (affectionately, #ds106), upon such a week in January.

…it is time to push yourself beyond your creative comfort zone, time for us to wrestle honestly with the future of education through praxis and engagement and, more than anything else in my book, it’s time to make some damned art already. Let’s go!!!! Bava Tuesdays

Indeed. Let’s go!!!

When Amber Strocel visited the Talons classroom last fall, she spoke about the power of social media to unite each of us with our “Best People,” our tribe, and after two years wandering the deserts of the Twittersphere, blogging, and the wilds of Facebook, I am getting closer to a unifying purpose in the integration of technology in my classroom, and my classroom with the pursuit of my life’s passion.

I am four years into this experiment in teaching, and have in place many aspects of my personal and professional life that allow (challenge?) my mind to wander to what else I might do with this developing understanding – of my role as a teacher, citizen, and member of the human race. Working with gifted students in a tech-infused classroom that covers modern English and history curriculum in the emergent terrain of the digital universe has not dampened the spirit forged by my years as a Creative Writing student in the deep south, who worked furiously in black ink and blank sheets of paper on imitation Kerouac, and Henry David Thoreau tomes, double-underlining the words, Simplify, Simplify, Simplify.

But this isn’t to say it isn’t more complicated, as the modern world beckons always at the door, television, phone, and computer screen. Jabiz puts it nicely:

I have never in my life been more “connected” than right now. I could riddle this post with a barrage of hyperlinks denoting the many pies into which my fingers are currently poked. I could send you, dear reader, on a scavenger hunt of content that I have created or am in the process of creating. Links to  posts, tweets, applications exalting the wonder of technology and connection, but as I sit here on my sofa with the nasally seductive voice of Colin Meloy crooning me into a state of comfortable obscurity, I’m left with one question- why do I feel so empty and alone? Isn’t this global connectivity supposed to alleviate my solitude? Shouldn’t my sharing bring me closer to you?

As I stated toward the end of a rather lengthy reply to his post, I think that:

the opportunity we do have, though, if we are driven to positively inhabit our shared space, and aid one another in realizing our best selves in the world, is revolutionary. So many people sharing their most intimate personal revelations – good and ill – is a powerful commodity, and we stand at a juncture where, in this moment, we are able to freely interact and communicate in myriad ways.

I’m happy to have stumbled in through the side door of this thing called #ds106 – it seemed to come along at just the right time.

Thanks Jabiz and Jim for the kick in the right direction.

Now to get going – on all of it!